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Información del artículo Hagiography and Monastic Literature between Greek East and Latin West in Late Antiquity.
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Jerusalem is a city holy to three world religions: Judaism, Christianity and Islam. From the early Byzantine period, Christian pilgrimage here and to other holy sites became a »mass phenomenon« after Saint Helen was said to have... more
Jerusalem is a city holy to three world religions: Judaism, Christianity and Islam. From the early Byzantine period, Christian pilgrimage here and to other holy sites became a »mass phenomenon« after Saint Helen was said to have miraculously discovered the »True Cross of Christ«, and her son Constantine the Great had built churches in this area. Thousands of Christian believers made their way to holy sites in Palestine, Egypt and other places in order to physically experience salvation history and seek divine intervention in their lives. Numerous travel reports, pilgrim guides and other written sources highlight important aspects of pilgrimage. In addition, many well-preserved churches, monasteries, hostels and other buildings, as well as rich archaeological findings, provide us with a vivid and synthetic picture of the history of pilgrimage to the Holy Land. In the course of these religiously motivated journeys, people of the three »religions of the book« came into contact and interacted in a multitude of ways. Full download avalable here: https://books.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/propylaeum/reader/download/711/711-29-89704-1-10-20200721.pdf
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Tackling issues of church and state is a tall order under any circumstances. Taking the metahistorical view and summarizing the scholarship on church and state makes it positively daunting, especially when the half-century under... more
Tackling issues of church and state is a tall order under any circumstances. Taking the metahistorical view and summarizing the scholarship on church and state makes it positively daunting, especially when the half-century under consideration spans the entire lifetime of the author. This task is made even more challenging when the societies and cultures under investigation are late antiquity and medieval Byzantium, the former (c.300–c.800, encompassing the entire Mediterranean) a paradigmatic period of religious change, the latter (330–1453, focusing on the Greek-speaking eastern half of the Roman empire and its subsequent history) emblematic of ‘otherness’ when compared to the Christian tradition in the West that has shaped our worldview to the present day.
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Albrecht Diem and Claudia Rapp, ‘The Monastic Laboratory: Perspectives of Research in Late Antique and Early Medieval Monasticism’, in: Alison Beach and Isabelle Cochelin (eds.), The Cambridge History of Medieval Monasticism in the Latin... more
Albrecht Diem and Claudia Rapp, ‘The Monastic Laboratory: Perspectives of Research in Late Antique and Early Medieval Monasticism’, in: Alison Beach and Isabelle Cochelin (eds.), The Cambridge History of Medieval Monasticism in the Latin West, vol. 1, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2020, pp. 19-39. Please contact me if you are interested in this text: adiem@maxwell.syr.edu This chapter provides a roadmap for new approaches to the history of early medieval monasticism (or rather of monasticisms) beyond the traditional narrative that starts in the Egyptian desert and culminates in the Carolingian monastic reforms in the West or the foundation of the Great Lavra in the East. Instead of assuming that the late antique world created a largely stable monastic ideal revolving around a dichotomy of eremitic and coenobitic monasticism and the imperative of a vita regularis, monasticism should be viewed as a long-term experiment to shape ideal religious communities. These communities faced the challenge to develop a theological basis that did not cross doctrinal boundaries and to shape internal structures, disciplinary systems and economic models that allowed them to function perpetually and to gain them a place and role within the changing societal structures of the late antique and post-Roman world. The result of these experiments was a broad diversity of often competing forms of communal life. Most sources establish a rhetoric of harmony, uniformity and organic development that conceals frictions and conflicts among monastic communities and between monasteries and the surrounding world. This means that our sources need to be read against the grain, identifying their agency in creating invented traditions and master narratives still powerful today and using them for a rigorous “archaeology of concepts”. Such an approach opens the ‘monastic laboratory’ to interdisciplinary approaches and invites various disciplines outside of history and theology to explore the monastic experiment.
Research Interests: Art, Theology, Patristics, Asceticism, Monastic Studies, and 13 moreLate Antiquity, Michel Foucault, Church History, Byzantine monasticism, Monasticism, History of Monasticism, Archaeology of Medieval Monasteries, Desert Fathers, Early Medieval Monasticism, Benedictine Monasticism, Cambridge University, Sociology of Monastic Life, and Early Middle Ages History
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Claudia Rapp, "Cypriot Hagiography in the Seventh Century: Patrons and Purpose"
Albrecht Diem and Claudia Rapp, ‘The Monastic Laboratory: Perspectives of Research in Late Antique and Early Medieval Monasticism’, in: Alison Beach and Isabelle Cochelin (eds.), The Cambridge History of Medieval Monasticism in the Latin... more
Albrecht Diem and Claudia Rapp, ‘The Monastic Laboratory: Perspectives of Research in Late Antique and Early Medieval Monasticism’, in: Alison Beach and Isabelle Cochelin (eds.), The Cambridge History of Medieval Monasticism in the Latin West, vol. 1, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2020, pp. 19-39. Please contact me if you are interested in this text: adiem@maxwell.syr.edu This chapter provides a roadmap for new approaches to the history of early medieval monasticism (or rather of monasticisms) beyond the traditional narrative that starts in the Egyptian desert and culminates in the Carolingian monastic reforms in the West or the foundation of the Great Lavra in the East. Instead of assuming that the late antique world created a largely stable monastic ideal revolving around a dichotomy of eremitic and coenobitic monasticism and the imperative of a vita regularis, monasticism should be viewed as a long-term experiment to shape ideal religious communities. These communities fa...
Research Interests: Theology, Patristics, Asceticism, Monastic Studies, Late Antiquity, and 11 moreMichel Foucault, Church History, Byzantine monasticism, Monasticism, History of Monasticism, Archaeology of Medieval Monasteries, Desert Fathers, Early Medieval Monasticism, Benedictine Monasticism, Sociology of Monastic Life, and Early Middle Ages History
Organizer: Prof. Dr. Claudia Rapp (Project Leader, Moving Byzantium Project, University of Vienna / Austrian Academy of Sciences) Team: Nicholas J. B. Evans (Austrian Academy of Sciences), Emilio Bonfiglio (University of Vienna),... more
Organizer: Prof. Dr. Claudia Rapp (Project Leader, Moving Byzantium Project, University of Vienna / Austrian Academy of Sciences) Team: Nicholas J. B. Evans (Austrian Academy of Sciences), Emilio Bonfiglio (University of Vienna), Ekaterini Mitsiou (University of Vienna), Johannes Preiser-Kapeller (Austrian Academy of Sciences), Yannis Stouraitis (Austrian Academy of Sciences), Paraskevi Sykopetritou (University of Vienna) Sponsor: The Wittgenstein-Prize Project ‘Mobility, Microstructures and Personal Agency’ of the FWF (Austrian National Research Foundation). W: http://rapp.univie.ac.at/ For further information, please contact Ms. Paraskevi Sykopetritou (Coordinator, Moving Byzantium Project): paraskevi.sykopetritou@univie.ac.at
this sense, the establishment ofmodern ministries to control and supervise foundation properties is another chapter in the nationalization of state resources. The relationship of the state to waqfs is the theme of several essays. Rachida... more
this sense, the establishment ofmodern ministries to control and supervise foundation properties is another chapter in the nationalization of state resources. The relationship of the state to waqfs is the theme of several essays. Rachida Chih examines the role of provincial political elites, including Mamluks, Bedouin shaykhs, and religious scho lars, in est ablishing charitable foundations in Ottoman Jirja. Faruk Bilici's study of the Istanbul neighborhood of Uskiidar shows the impact of foundations on an elite residential area in the nineteenth century. Abdelhamid Henia treats the subject of the transition of waqf from private act to state monopoly in Tunisia, while Odile Moreau finds that the administration of Qur'an schools became a site for conflict between cobnial officials and Tunisian society under the French Protectorate. Randi Deguittiem's essay on twentieth century Syria shows how a modern state used nationalism to justify wholesale seizure of the country's foundations. Franz Kogelmann argues that despite similarities in the policies of modern Morocco, Algeria, and Egypt towards waqf, there are also significant differences between them. One conclusion that emerges from this collection is that the process of centralization and increased state control of foundations began well before the "reforms" instituted by colonial po wers and modern nation states that deprived many waqfs of their private character, and thus of many of the motivations that led to their founding. The question of continuity, or lack thereof, between the Ottoman period and later developments is in need of more thought. Another subject in need of further study is the current debateoverthepossibleroleofwa^/'inarevitalized Islamic civil society. It remains to be seen whether waqf has an important role to play in contemporary Muslim societies. Adam Sabra West Michigan University
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Research Interests: Christianity, Theology, Patristics, New Testament, Literature, and 13 moreByzantine Literature, Pilgrimage, Early Christianity, Orthodox Theology, Biblical Studies, Old Testament, Manuscript Studies, Byzantine Studies, Late Antiquity, Byzantine Paleography and codicology, Manuscripts (Medieval Studies), Seals, and Tabula Imperii Byzantini
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Development of the cult, including the hagiographical accounts, of Epiphanius of Cyprus. The only summary of my dissertation currently in print.
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Based on the 74 palimpsested objects studied in the Sinai Palimpsests Project (sinaipalimpsests.org), this article presents first observations on the creation and use of palimpsested writing material (also in comparison to Jewish and... more
Based on the 74 palimpsested objects studied in the Sinai Palimpsests Project (sinaipalimpsests.org), this article presents first observations on the creation and use of palimpsested writing material (also in comparison to Jewish and Muslim practices) and the presence of erased languages in relation to the languages of the overtext.
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This article underlines the importance of approaching written sources for what they are: authorial constructs. This is true also for depictions of mobility and migration. Byzantine authors instrumentalized these for their own purposes... more
This article underlines the importance of approaching written sources for what they are: authorial constructs. This is true also for depictions of mobility and migration. Byzantine authors instrumentalized these for their own purposes beyond the event at hand. Authorial focus, along with the requirements of the chosen literary genre, is also the reason for the different scales of actors that appear in these texts, whether large blurry masses of nameless people, smaller groups with a distinct profile, or finely drawn individuals.
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This multiauthored article presents a new project to study Byzantine prayer books (euchologia) by a team of scholars at the Austrian Academy of Sciences. The longterm aim of the project is to create a census of all extant prayer book... more
This multiauthored article presents a new project to study Byzantine prayer books (euchologia) by a team of scholars at the Austrian Academy of Sciences. The longterm aim of the project is to create a census of all extant prayer book manuscripts for the use of priests in Greek up to the year 1650, in order to facilitate the study of the ‘occasional prayers’ as sources for daily life and social history. After an extended introduction to the history of scholarship and the methodological challenges encountered in the first three years of the project, the first two individual contributions highlight the importance of manuscript study in situ, by addressing issues of codicology and the history of manuscripts as evidenced in the liturgical commemorations they contain. The following three contributions demonstrate the value of the ‘small prayers’ as a largely untapped historical source through the study of prayers for changing religious affiliation, prayers for female purity in conjunction with childbirth, and prayers in the context of primary education.